pable of the hardy young Canadian noblesse
whom he had at hand, a man accustomed to the life of the forest, and
sent with him this large party to assert against the English the right
of France to the valley of the Ohio. The English were now to be shut out
definitely from advancing westward and to be confined to the strip of
territory lying between the Atlantic coast and the Alleghany Mountains,
a little more than that strip fifty miles wide talked about in Quebec as
the maximum concession of France, but still not very much according to
the ideas of the English, and even this not secure if France should ever
grow strong enough to crowd them out.

At no time do we find more vivid the contrast in type between the two
nations. Before a concrete fact the British take action. When they gave
up Louisbourg they built Halifax. Their traders had pressed into the
Ohio country, not directed under any grandiose idea of empire, but
simply as individuals, to trade and reap for themselves what profit they
could. When they were checked and menaced by the French, they saw that
something must be done. How they did it we shall see presently. It was
the weakness of the English colonies that they could not unite to
work out a great plan. If Virginia took steps to advance westward,
Pennsylvania was jealous lest lands which she desired should go to a
rival colony. France, on the other hand, had complete unity of design.
Celoron spoke in the name of the King of France and he spoke in terms
uncompromising enough. "The Ohio," said the King of France through his
agent, "belongs to me." It is a French river. The lands bordering upon
it are "my lands." The English intruders are foreign robbers and not
one of them is to be left in the western country: "I wilt not endure
the English on my land." The Indians, dwelling in that region, are "my
children."

Scattered over the vast region about the Great Lakes were a good many
French. At the lower end of Lake Ontario stood Fort Frontenac, a menace
to the colony of New York, as the dwellers in the British post of Oswego
on the opposite shore of the lake well knew. We have already seen that
the French held a fort at Niagara guarding the route leading farther
west to Lake Erie and to regions beyond Lake Erie, by way of the Ohio or
the upper lakes, to the Mississippi. Near the mouth of the Mississippi,
New Orleans was now becoming a considerable town with a governor
independent of the governor at Quebec. Along